lost in a sonic boom

I hate flying, but I love the sound of jets overhead. I love the sound of freeways when you're in a motel room in some desolate surburban nowhere, smoking a cigarette in the parking lot on a Tuesday night when all the business travelers are asleep. And I love freeways when you wake up on a bus and it's dawn in the middle of nowhere, when you're at a truck stop whose retro glory you'd revel in if the bus weren't leaving and you had more than five minutes to finish the cigarette and brush your teeth.

It's a safe feeling, somehow, to be nowhere. And the sound is the only thing that makes it safe, the assurance that there is a plan, that everyone else is going too.

I love New York City. I could never live there, but I love the sounds it makes at night and its dirty pink sky. I love stepping out of my small and stupid life into a place where if I crumpled up and died I would be indistinguishable from a missing bag of trash spilled out across the gutter of some dirtway filled with machines and no human faces. Hell, the whole east coast. The industrial blankness. The calmness of simply not existing.

Hummingbirds appear sometimes in my yard and I wonder where they came from. And I don't finish the thought because I go inside and they disappear. We're all so short-lived, with our hearts racing and the passions we dream up, and we rush like swooshing jets towards nothing. It feels good to rush toward nothing. But it feels best in the center of that storm, when you hear the rushing all around you and you are standing still, smoking a cigarette and aiming your guts at oblivion.